Poor Kristy

I got the latest email update from GWR Bristol today, which mentioned their current breakfast contest – Bush and Troy Almighty. In it, they ‘take control’ of a listener’s life. Bascially, the listener has to do what the audience tells them and if they manage to make it to the end of the contest, they take home £10k.

As well as creating compelling on air audio with lots of jeapordy, I think the GWR team have done a good job of making on-line a key part of the promotion. As well as generating ‘talkability’, stunts like these are a great way to drive people online and then hopefully turn them into a more regular site visitor.

Kristy, the chosen listener, has had a bit of a shock with the latest challenge – a haircut. Listeners are deciding whether she gets a Jennifer Aniston, a Posh Spice or a GI Jane through an online-only vote. GWR also video’d the moment when she was told on-air about the challenge. This kind of video-activity is very simple. Have a look at the footage, it’s not exactly Spielberg, but it’s clearly shot and definitely of interest to listeners who heard it in the morning and would quite like to see it on video too. The other thing they did for the video is to dub on the audio from the radio – it makes it nice and crisp and the jocks sound like they do on the radio rather than through a crappy on-camera mic.

The site has lots of content from the competition including a diary and audio of lots of the other challenges. It definitely begins to give a 360 view of the contest.

They fall down slightly on bringing all the content together in an easy navigatable way, but I guess that’s partly because their stuck with the god-awful MediaSpan CMS. If there’s one promo that’s crying out for a blog style (with nice embedded video and audio oppportunities) this one’s it. But overall a good effort from GWR.

Mediaspan has got better, but is still expensive doesn’t work well on macs and frankley dated, although there are strong steps in the right direction, things have got better, you must remember that First Media Works built the CMS that is the building blocks for the current cms system.

Now i’m not sticking up for them as I hate using it and the future of Station websites seem to involve employing developers.

Virgin has the best radio site in the commerical market I would say.

Maybe GCap should of set up a wordpress blog for this activity and branded it up with some logos etc, all it take’s is some out of the box thinking.. plus wordpress is free, you could most prob set your ads up on it too.